TORONTO - Two groups representing Canada's community health centres are calling on the federal and Ontario governments to implement a Tommy Douglas-inspired second stage of medicare that would see more emphasis put on prevention than treatment.
The Association of Ontario Health Centres and the Canadian Alliance of Community Health Centres are sponsoring a two-day conference in Toronto, beginning Thursday. There, conference attendees will discuss ways of realizing the two-stage approach to health care promoted by Douglas, the former Saskatchewan premier widely regarded as the father of Canadian medicare.
That means giving illness prevention a primary, rather than secondary, role in the health-care system, conference spokesperson France Gelinas said, adding that the two groups want health care that is more timely, accessible and equitable.
It also means Canadians should be more actively involved in making decisions about their health and a greater emphasis on self-care, said Gelinas.
It wouldn't cost "that much" more than it already does to institute this form of health care, she added.
"It would be more into redistributing as to what we are doing now. There's already a phenomenal amount of money being invested in the treatment side of the health care system," she said.
"We trying to put a good fencing system at the top of the cliff, rather than improving the ambulance system at the bottom."
Ontario Health Minister George Smitherman, former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow and health policy experts are scheduled to speak at the conference.
Romanow said governments spend too much time worrying about the treatment aspect of health care, mentioning wait times as one issue that receives plenty of attention. That attention, he said, would be better placed on addressing social problems, such as poverty and childhood obesity, which can lead to health problems.
"The solutions are at hand, they just haven't been attended to by the political people and they haven't received the attention that I think they deserve," Romanow said.
While Canada has one of the world's best health care systems, Romanow said the problems he and the other conference attendees have identified have long been simmering. It could take a "quite a long time" to change the way the health-care system works, he added.
"We didn't get into this jackpot overnight, that's for sure. This is a matter of neglect over many decades," he said. "We're not going to get out of it overnight."
Conference organizers expect more than 500 people to attend.
